MustangList.com Blog

The short answer is yes. The long answer is make sure you know what you’re paying for—if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not worth it. Most email lists that you buy are going to be out of date and dirty—full of old, bad email addresses that will cause lots of bounces. This can hurt your good sending reputation because the ISPs (Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, etc.) will red flag senders that send an email that goes to a lot of bad, bouncing email addresses. And many lists are scraped from websites and contain email addresses that aren’t really valid: webmaster@, info@, etc.

So how do you rent or buy an email list that’s legitimate? Carefully. Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. You don’t want to buy a list. If someone is offering to sell you a list, that should send up a red flag. If the list is valuable, why would they sell it? A list will only remain valuable if the use of the list (how many and what type of emails are being sent to it) is carefully managed. Use of a list cannot be controlled if copies of it are being sold.
2. You want to rent a list. List owners who’ve been given permission to send emails from third parties can legitimately rent their lists. They’ll also be careful to manage the use of the list so that it remains valuable—in other words, they’ll be more careful about how frequently the list is emailed to and if the emails will be relevant to their subscribers. For example, a travel company might send a third party email from a hotel chain, but would most likely decline to send a third party email for a home-improvement store. This is good for you because there’s a better chance the recipients will be receptive to your offer.
3. Try and be included in an existing email newsletter. This gives you the opportunity to reach out to a new audience within the context of an email newsletter and company that the recipients know and open. You don’t risk creating a negative impression of your brand as there is no confusion on the part of the reader as to whom the email was sent from and why they are receiving it.
4. You want the list owner to introduce your product or service to their list. If the list owner will send a separate, dedicated email for you, ideally you want it to be in the context of a partnership or an endorsement of your product. Sure, the owner might be allowed to send a third party message, but will it make sense from the eyes of the reader? Your product will not be presented in the best light if your message lacks meaningful context—if there is no attempt to connect your company to the company whose email list the reader subscribed to.
5. The “From” address should be the list owners name—this is who the readers have a relationship with. This will also help give your email the context of being endorsed by the list owner. A list owner who wants to put your name in the “From” address field should also send up a red flag. If your name were in the “From” address, you would look like a spammer as the recipient didn’t sign up to receive email from you and may not know who your company is. That’s a negative brand impression that you could do without.
6. Remind people why they’re getting the email. Sometimes, you will be handed over a list of email addresses: there are some organizations (often at colleges and universities) where the members agree to receive email from other members of the organization. Sometimes the organization will handle sending emails to the list, and other times they’ll give the list to the members. In this case, remind the recipients that they’re receiving the email as a member of the organization. But be wary of sending in this scenario, too. Joining the organization to get access to the email list might not end up being fruitful if the email list is just handed over to whomever wants it; if there’s no oversight as to who can join and the use of the email addresses, your time and money might be better spent elsewhere.
7. Remember this word: Co-Registration. You can also work with third parties who have websites with relatively high traffic. They will ask for the opt-in and collect email addresses specifically for your newsletter or email list. This is an excellent way to grow your list as the people on the list know what they’re signing up for and will be anticipating your email communication.

For more information about working with third parties in your list building efforts, contact Mustang List.

You know you can use Mustang List to send your email newsletter and other promotional emails, but have you considered the system’s transactional applications? You probably already send a confirmation email that is auto-generated from your website when a customer makes a purchase. But what if you want to contact that customer later to find out how their shopping experience was? What if you want to send them a small series of questions or a survey so you can find out how you’re doing? Mustang List’s Response Form and Recurring Message features can combine to create a powerful customer communication management tool. Find out how you’re doing by sending an email that includes a link to a short survey a few days after your online sale. This is not a confirmation email, this is an email that you can send a few days after the sale to stay in front of the customer and solicit feedback. Here’s how:

1. When a purchase is made on your website, use the API to have the purchaser added to a list in Mustang List. You’ll probably want to create a list like “web purchasers” for this purpose. You cannot add these customers’ email addresses to your regular newsletter list unless you explicitly asked for and received permission. Be sure to carefully manage this new list to avoid mailing them marketing emails.
2. Set up a survey of the questions you’d like to ask the customer using Mustang List’s Response Forms.
3. Set up a Recurring Message to send a fixed number of days after the Sign Up date (the Sign Up date being the date they were added to the list by the API, the date of purchase). You should already be sending a confirmation email immediately upon purchasing, so give the customer a few days’ break before you send this email. Depending on the types of questions you ask, you might want to anticipate the number of days it would normally take for the item to ship and send the survey after the customer would most likely have received the item.
4. After the purchaser is added to the list, the clock will start ticking on your recurring message and X number of days after the date they were added to the list, the email with the link to the survey will be sent.
5. After you receive your first response, you can view the responses online in Mustang List or export the responses to a CSV file for viewing in MS excel and other applications. You can also view the bounce, open, and click rate data in Mustang List (something you can’t do with web-generated emails).

Keep in mind:

• You can absolutely send an email to a customer that’s transactional in nature, but DON’T market to them as they might consider the communication unsolicited commercial email (aka SPAM).
• DO carefully manage your list of web purchasers list and purge it occasionally to avoid accidentally sending marketing emails to these customers.
• DO include a shout out and link to sign up for your newsletter. Sending a “How are we doing” email and survey is a great way to build your email list if you properly solicit and receive permission.

Your email sign-up page is not just a way to collect opt-in information; it’s an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with your future subscribers. You can use your email sign up page to promote your email program and your subscribers can use the page to sign up and indicate their preferences. Clearly communicating the type of email communication you send can increase your customers’ trust in your business, leading to increased sign-ups. By carefully considering the type and amount of information you collect, you offer some control to your customers in regards to the information they will receive from you. And by collecting better data, you can better target your subscribers, leading to higher open rates.

Things to consider when building a great email sign-up page:

• Make it interesting and/or fun. Promote the email publication as a stand-alone product. Communicate the value it will have to your customers if they sign up. Remember that you can use this page as a landing page if you promote your email publication on third party websites, etc.
• Provide a sample newsletter. Have a full graphic version of the newsletter that potential subscribers can view. This sample should be the real deal showing everything from the subject line at the top of the newsletter to the unsubscribe links at the bottom. This is important: it provides a better picture (literally) of what your customers are signing up for and it legitimizes your email communications by showing that you play by the rules (you have unsubscribe links, etc.).
• Link to archived newsletter content. Sharing archived newsletter content on your website will demonstrate to your customers your commitment to providing valuable information in your emails.
• Incentivize the sign-up. Mention that in the first email you will receive a promo code for X% off, or something similar.
• Keep it simple. Only ask for the information you need and intend to use. An overly long sign-up page can lead to abandonment of the sign-up process.
• Email change of address. Make sure you allow customers to update their email addresses.
• Use drop down menus wherever possible. Using drop down menus for things like city, state, and country will ensure you get responses that you can use for targeting and will eliminate misspellings, abbreviations, etc. that you cannot target with.
• Validate the information. Validate zip codes to ensure they’re real. Validate email addresses. Validate everything you can.
• Do more with less information. If you have your programmers populate fields on the backend you can ask for less information from your customers but still get what you need to work with. For example, from the zip code, programmers can auto-populate fields for city and state.
• Clearly state the frequency of the emails you send (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). Better yet, let your customers choose the frequency they prefer.
• Provide choice. Not every customer wants to read every message. If you can provide several different email publications, let them choose which interests them the most. Give your customers what they want and your value will increase in their eyes. Remember, you can use your newsletters to cross sell your other email subscriptions.
• Clear way to unsubscribe. If the sign-up page is also a preference/profile page from which subscribers unsubscribe, make sure it’s very clear how to unsubscribe.
• Be polite. Make sure you have a Thank You/Confirmation page that appears after customers submit the sign-up page. Thank them for signing up and let them know what will happen next (they will receive a welcome email in the next couple hours, they will begin receiving email in the next week or so, etc.—whatever applies).

Maybe your creative could use a face-lift. Maybe your offers have become stale and predictable. Don’t underestimate the difference an update to your email design can make. With a fresh design and some new offers, you might find you can keep your new members engaged longer and you can re-activate some members that seem to be losing interest.

If you tend to offer the same kind of special from email to email, try mixing it up a little. See how a Free Shipping offer performs. Try a dollar off with minimum purchase offer vs. giving a percent off the total. Changing the nature of the deal can catch your reader’s eye and elicit a click-through. If your emails are not offer-based, but are rather content-based, work on having clear subject lines that give readers a hint as to what’s in store for them if they open the email.

If your email design hasn’t changed in the last year or so, consider a redesign. You could freshen up the color palette and adjust the font or it could be a complete overhaul—changing the concept and even the name of the publication as well as the design.

Another thing to consider is re-working the layout. For an email that is text-heavy, you might try putting the content on your website so you can shorten the email by providing links to the “full story” on your website. If your email uses a lot of graphics, make sure that the graphics are not pulling the eye away from your main message.

Come up with a few options and test the different designs and/or offers to random samples of your list. See which emails get more clicks and trigger more members to spend time and money on your website after clicking. If you’re testing creative, you’ll probably want to keep the subject lines the same, so all else is equal.

And remember, since you’re trying to get members who haven’t recently opened emails to open this new email and see the new design, you’ll want to carefully strategize the subject line. You might even want to target the least active members with the new creative and an extra-special offer, whereas for your more engaged members, you simply ask them to check out your new design. You’ll have to decide which approach is more likely to be successful with your customers. Whatever you do, try a few different things with different subsets of members so you have some results to compare.

Another way to breathe new life into an email list with a fair number of inactive members is to send targeted emails. You can target a sub-set of subscribers on your list that have something in common or to whom you want to present the same offer—they purchased from your website in the last week, or they live in the same city, or they have the same profession, for example. Normally the offer in a targeted email is something especially relevant to the targeted group of subscribers and might not even be something you’d offer list-wide.

You have probably already collected information on your sign-up form that you can use for targeting. Information like: Date subscribed to list, Zip Code, City, State, Country, Date of Birth, Source of sign up (web page, convention, trade show, etc.). But you might find you need to collect more information from your subscribers to effectively market to them.

State may not make a difference in the products you market, but gender might. You might want to market according to your subscribers’ hobbies or preferred vacation destinations. You can make categories for the different types of products you sell and ask your customers to choose the products (categories) that most interest them. Realtors can make categories for the number of bedrooms or sizes of houses for sale and ask customers to select the options (categories) that fit what they’re looking for. Once you have this useful information you can send emails to your customers that are relevant and valuable to them.

Here are some ideas for getting your subscribers to update their profiles to give you the additional information you need to market more effectively:

• Opt-in Form. Start with a good opt-in form—don’t ask for too much information, but ask for enough. And only ask for information you intend to use.
• Contests. Hold a contest and post a contest entry form on your website. Link to this form from an email promoting the contest and require that the form be filled out entirely in order to enter the contest. Go ahead and require all of the fields—it’s not too much to ask for information in exchange for an entry into the contest. Make sure this new information is passed onto your email database through APIs or otherwise and that it can update the current email subscribers in the database with the additional information. If you promote the contest on your website (not just exclusively to your email list) remember that though you can ask for an opt-in to your email newsletter, you cannot require the opt-in in order to enter the contest.
• Send Periodic Info Update Emails. After the initial welcome email, send an email soliciting more information. Some kind of message that engages the customer to help you know what information to send them: “let us know what you’re interested in so we can send you emails you want to open,” for example. This can be especially useful if you don’t collect subscriber info upon sign-up (when you use a subscribe box on your home page, for example).
• Customize the Content. If you can customize the content of the email based on your subscribers’ preferences, let them know! Put a note near the content that can be customized mentioning that the information displayed can be customized by city, state, preference, etc. next time they receive the email if they update their preferences. Provide a link to your subscriber update page with this note.

In the last blog, we looked at how you can try to re-engage subscribers who are not opening your emails. But what about subscribers whose responses are diminishing, but whom you haven’t ‘lost’ yet?

Adjust Your Frequency

What is the point where the return on your emails (and the value of your emails) diminishes because you have fatigued your customers by sending email too frequently? For the most part you’ll have to determine this on your own: there is no one answer to how many emails are too many vs. how many are effective. But here are a few places you can begin:

1. Since frequency is in the eye of the beholder, one strategy for dealing with this issue is to let your customers decide how frequently they receive email from you. Let them sign up for weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly emails. You can segment them into groups or categories based on this preference. You can either create separate publications for each of these preferences (for example, combining two weeks’ worth of weekly emails for your bi-weekly subscribers or a months’ worth of emails into one email for your monthly subscribers) or you can just send your regular weekly email that falls on the week your monthly subscribers get their once-a-month email (and the weeks when your bi-weekly subscribers get their bi-weekly emails). It’s much easier to manage sending at different frequencies than it seems.
2. If you think you might be over-sending to your customers, then try sending less often. Before you commit to a new schedule, test the diminished frequency on a portion of your list. Segment a sizeable portion of your list and for the next month or so, send to them less frequently than you normally do. Whatever period of time you decide to use as the test period, make sure that by the end of the test period, you’ve sent a few emails so you can better measure the effect reduced frequency has on open rates. You could find out that you can send less often but have the same number of emails opened as when you send more often—because you gain back some customers that had stopped opening email they perceived as coming too often.
3. Are you risking fatiguing your customers who receive more than one of your email publications? If you mail to several lists, check to see how many subscribers are on both lists. Consider the effect the frequency of your mailings has on the single subscriber who receives all (or many) of your different email publications. If there is a lot of list overlap, or duplicate subscribers, you might need to reconsider the frequency with which you send your emails to these subscribers. If you can’t adjust your frequency, then consider alternating the emails the duplicate subscribers receive so that they don’t get overloaded.

Communicate with your customers and solicit their feedback as to the frequency with which they prefer to receive your emails. Test different sending frequencies. And above all, when you make adjustments, pay attention to your open rates—especially the open rates among customers that are not freshly added—so you can measure the effect of your efforts at re-vitalizing your list.

In the last blog, one of the list building strategies was to look at your current subscriber list for opportunities to re-engage inactive members. These subscribers know your brand and can be relatively easy to convert into more active members.

Over the next few blogs, we’ll consider a few strategies for re-activating members.

Engage the Non-Responders

People who automatically delete your emails without opening them—but won’t unsubscribe from your list—take up space and cost you money when you send to them. They also drive down your open rates.

Remember there’s a period of engagement after a customer signs up for your list. It’s within this period that they are most likely to respond to your offers. If after a month or so from signing up for your list the subscriber has not opened one of your emails, it’s not likely you’ll receive a response from this subscriber later down the road.

Try sending a “Last Chance Special Offer” email to subscribers who haven’t opened an email in the last 2 or 3 months (or whatever time frame is appropriate for your business model and your sending frequency). Delete from your list anyone who doesn’t open this email. If they don’t want your extra special offer (make sure the nature of the deal is clear in the subject line) and haven’t opened an email from you in 3 months, they probably don’t want to hear your message.

Alternatively, you could send an email to these subscribers asking if they want to remain on your list—reminding them of the value of your email communications and requesting any feedback as to what they’d like to see in your emails. A few years ago, MINI sent me an email asking if I was ‘bored’ with their emails (I hadn’t opened any in several weeks). The catchy subject line (I think the word ‘bored’ was in the subject) got me to open that email and for a while, at least, I opened their subsequent emails. Delete subscribers who don’t open this email and enjoy the slightly increased open rates.

For subscribers who do respond to an effort at re-engagement, you might consider targeting them separately from your regular list for a period of time. Now that you have them engaged, carefully get them back with the program. You might send email to them a little less frequently. You could also present them with some special deals that you might not be able to offer list-wide, but that you can offer on a more limited basis. This might require a little more strategy on your part, but it’s well worth the effort.

Don’t ignore your existing list

When implementing your list building efforts, it’s important not to forget your existing list.

Re-Engage the Members on Your List

Members of your list that have become inactive can often be wooed back. Implementing strategies to re-activate and re-engage inactive members can prove to be fruitful because these customers know your brand and wooing them back often requires very little effort. See blog: Re-Energize Your List.

Two other ideas you might not have considered that could be appropriate for your list and business model are:

Email Change of Address

If you have large numbers of bounced records due to invalid email addresses, you might consider taking your bounced email list to a 3rd party service provider who can perform Email Change of Address (ECOA) services. By scanning your list of bounces, they can often match the old email addresses to new, updated ones. For more information on ECOA services contact Mustang List.

Email Address Append

Your direct-mailing list might also have some value to your email program. Often email addresses can be matched up to the mailing addresses on your direct-mailing list through 3rd party Append services. You can then send an email to these customers asking for an explicit opt-in to your email list. (This means that they have to actively opt-in to your list—being added to your list because they fail to respond to your request does not count as an “explicit” opt-in.)

As you venture into the world of list building, remember that email is an extremely effective tool for developing and sustaining your relationship with your customer. Develop strategies to enhance your customers’ experience. Customers who are interested in your services, products, or message are quality subscribers who will stay on your list, open your emails, and give you their business.

Seek opportunities with partners

After maximizing all the resources within your company to build your email list, you can look externally for list building opportunities.

If you can offer value to your partners’ customers, then you offer value to your partner.

With that in mind, it might be possible to have an opt-in for your email list on your partners’ websites. Consider these locations:

• Partners’ website registration page (especially if they don’t have a newsletter themselves)
• Partners’ shopping cart page
• Partners’ email sign-up page if their emails are substantively different than yours
• A page on your partners’ sites where they list links, neat things, and/or their partners (hopefully your company)

List building strategies for you and your partner:

• Create co-registration pages with partners during limited time only promotions. This works really well on micro-sites created for specific promotions where several companies are involved.
• Hold a contest with a partner for the sole purpose of having a contest-entry page where email sign-up for both companies is solicited.
• Swap content. If you and your partner both have email newsletters, but the content is substantively different yet compatible, provide a small section of content for your partners’ newsletters (and vice versa). Who doesn’t want new, fresh content for their email publications? Be sure to include a link under the content you provided for “more info” and link to your email sign-up page. If you have a prominently placed subscribe box on your home page, you could even forgo the direct link to your sign up page (some partners won’t be agreeable to this) and just link to your home page (this is usually acceptable).
• Swap ads. Again, if you and your partners’ email offerings are essentially different, place a small graphic ad on your partners’ sites that promotes your email list as its own standalone valuable product. If you do the same for them, it’s an even trade.
• Send a co-marketing email through a partner’s list. This practice works well when accompanied by strict management of customer opt-in consent and careful propagation of unsubscribes among partners. (Think global opt-out list that both sides must respect: ensure that customers on a global opt-out list are not mailed to in the first place and that any new unsubscribes are removed from the active email lists of both partners). By presenting your brand or information through a partner’s email list you gain brand exposure and sales. Normally this email would contain a special offer (of high value to their customer) with a clear message stating more offers like this are available by signing up for your email list.

Next blog: Tip #6 - Don’t ignore your existing list

Promote the email list everywhere on your site and beyond

Don’t be shy about promoting your email list on and offline.

Online, use the traffic on your website to drive email sign-ups. “Advertise” your email list and its benefits throughout your website by placing small graphic ads that link to the email sign-up page. Where you can’t place graphics, add messages promoting the email list that link to the email opt-in page.

See our blog entry for ideas on Converting Web Visitors to Email List Subscribers.

Your company will have many points of contact where it can promote your email list, but not actually collect the email addresses as we discussed in the last blog. For example, you can’t leap off the back page of a catalogue and take down an email address. But this is a perfect offline opportunity to promote the email and its sign-up url.

You want to be sure the email sign-up url is pretty and short: www.yoursite.com/newsletter or www.yoursite.com/deals are examples. When promoting your email list offline, be sure you emphasize the value of the list to overcome the obstacle signing up presents to your customers (going to their computers, typing in your url, filling out a form, etc.) Often this is accomplished with a special sign-up offer: receive a 20% off coupon or promo code for signing up, for example.

At what points of contact within your organization can you promote signing up to the email list?

1. Promote the email sign-up page url on all of your printed materials—catalogues, brochures, direct mail, etc.
2. Distribute these materials at trade shows, conventions, etc. Or create small business cards for email list itself and distribute these.
3. Include a small “shout out” for email sign up (and the url) in all print ads. Remember to frame this in terms of the value you’re offering.
4. Promote the url in the “hold messaging” on customer service phone lines.
5. Promote the url on product registration cards, contest entry forms, etc.—you should already be collecting an email address on these forms, but promoting the email list might inspire your customers to act immediately and sign up directly.
6. Promote the email opt-in page url on employee signature lines in email correspondence.
7. If you have a direct mailing list, send an invitation to customers for a special offer if they sign up to receive email.
8. Include the url for email opt-in on all transaction and confirmation emails, shipping confirmation emails, invoices (both email and printed), on credit card receipts, packing slips, etc.
9. Include the email newsletter sign-up url in articles and at the bottom of press releases.
10. Include the sign-up url on the email itself, so if your customers don’t use your “send to a friend” feature and merely forward the original email, the “friend” sees the sign-up url and can take action.

Remember that these steps will often reach beyond the eCommerce department and Marketing departments. Research all forms of customer facing communication that every department throughout your organization engages in and determine where you can add a “shout out” about the email list.

Next blog: Tip #5 - Seek opportunities with partners